CAMINO kim demuth
CAMINO In the opening of Wim Wender’s classic film Paris, Texas (1984),we are introduced to a stoic character who is ceaselessly walking. Thecharacter, Travis, stops walking only when he collapses. Travis soonrecovers and continues, striding unflinchingly across a vast landscape ofdesolate plains. Possibly, he has been walking for years. Travis iseventually found by his bewildered brother Walt, who attempts to coerceTravis to the airport in order to fly home. Walt has no interest in thewalking journey his is a world of speed, where the annihilation of distanceis made possible through the telephone or the commercial airliner.Eventually the brothers compromise on a car journey. In Paris, Texas, the characters' respective positions in society aredefined by their modes of mobility. Walt’s desire to abolish distancethrough technological speed aligns him with the mainstream this is thenormal operating principle of capitalism. In contrast, Travis' persistent and
apparently aimless walking puts him at odds with the society around him: he is out of place and out of time. The speed of travel and communication is one of the defining traits of the contemporary era, and as David Harvey writes: “a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed­up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes appears to collapse inwards upon us.”1 The slowness of a long­distance walk, by choice and without clear purpose, is a space of detachment, a step outside of this world. It is in this context that 'El Camino de Santiago' is uniquely positioned. This pilgrimage across northern Spain dates from the ninth century, but continues today as the region’s main tourist product.2 Today the pilgrimage is at the intersection of two worlds: as a 40 day walk it is a unique journey of slowness that extends space, yet its popularity and accessibility is made possible via the global communications reach of the internet, and the continued rise of jet travel, both exemplary of the compression of space through speed.
Kim Demuth’s Camino series of photographic objects derive boththeir title and source material from the pilgrim’s trail. In 2008, Demuth andhis partner embarked on this 900 kilometre walking journey to the Cathedralat Santiago de Compostela. Authenticity is often invoked in travel discourse,creating a dichotomy between the tourist and the traveller, between fictionand reality, the inauthentic and the authentic.3 The Camino’s emphasis onthe journey, rather than the destination, gives this dichotomy a particularspin. While there are increasing numbers of visitors in Holy Years, theCamino today is predominately a secular journey.4 As such, religious piety isno longer the marker of the true pilgrim, but instead the traveller’s methodof mobility takes this role. To walk the pilgrimage is to obtain the status of apilgrim, to travel the route by car, no matter how pious one may be, is to beregarded a tourist. Indeed, it is the mode of transport that the Church itselfuses as the criteria for determining if one is a pilgrim of the Camino deSantiago: one needs to provide evidence of having walked at least 150km toreceive a Compostela.5 The Camino demands slowness. Journeys have often formed the basis for photography, from StephenShore’s and Joel Sternfeld’s roadtrips to Robert Adam’s slow and deliberatewalks around his beloved Colorado prairies, and Richard Misrach’s desertwanderings.6 Landscape photography in particular has commonly defineditself by the unique effects of a walking journey into nature. As Rosa Olivareswrites in her introduction to a volume on figureless landscape photographs,“on the road, along the trail, we think in slowness and silence, detached froma noisy fast superficial world that we have created in pursuit of protectionand wealth.”7 However, the objects of Demuth’s Camino, are not quitephotographs, nor are they accurate documents of the journey. Photographstaken during the walk are only the starting point in the production of thework. Through careful post­production Demuth combines, alters andtransforms these photographic fragments, turning them into three­dimensional mixed­media objects. Just as the works that comprise Caminocomplicate their genesis as landscape photography, so too is the Caminopilgrimage far from being just a trail, completely detached from the ‘noisy’world. The complications that each introduces to the apparentlystraightforward idea of ‘photographs along a path’ deserves investigation, aseach illuminates the other.
Across its long history, 'El Camino de Santiago' has been entangledin all manner of discourses, as it has been symbolically activated to suitbroader political and economic contexts. The pilgrimage has its roots in thebelief that the remains of James, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, hadbeen laid to rest near the Galician coast in northern Spain. Around theeighth century a cathedral was built to house the recently discovered tomband so began the pilgrimage, with people from across Europe making thelong trip on foot through a network of pilgrimage roads.8 Initially the Caminowas used by the Catholic Church as an example of the transnational powerof Catholicism, particularly in its medieval heyday. The symbolic activation ofSaint James would allow for modifications of this meaning. Through hisdesignation as ‘Saint James the Moorslayer’ the Camino would be tied, notjust to transnational Christianity, but more specifically to the IberianPeninsula which James was believed to have defended. This nationalist orterritorial connotation would come to dominate proceeding understandings ofSaint James, and by extension the Camino. In the fifteenth century SpanishKings began to make offerings to James, accentuating his role as a Saint ofSpanish Catholicism, rather than just Christianity­in­general. In thetwentieth century, the Franco regime would continue to tie the pilgrimage toSpanish nationalism. For Franco, this was an exclusionary tactic, used inspeeches and other discourse to help define the righteousness of his visionof the Spanish nation: a ‘chosen’ Spain.9 The demise of Franco and Spain’s subsequent immersion in culturaland economic globalisation has seen this territorial aspect of the Caminonow reach outward rather than inward. In 2000 Santiago was declared theEuropean Capital of Culture, and this exemplifies the transformation of theresting place of Saint James from a symbol of Spanish nationalism to asymbol of European integration.10 In many ways this is a return to earliertrans­national constructions of the Camino, with trails from across thecontinent leading to the cathedral. Except instead of symbolising the trans­nationalism of Catholicism, this now invokes the integration of the EuropeanUnion as a cultural and economic entity. Parts of the pilgrim’s trail have beengiven World Heritage Status by UNESCO, expanding its significance to aglobal audience.11 Certainly, today the Camino is seen as a global marketingopportunity.12
This is not to say that Spanish identity has been lost from theCamino, but rather that this national identity is increasingly defined asinclusive and cosmopolitan.13 This is particularly evident in contemporarySpanish cinema, with its focus on the urban landscape: the city as symbol ofinternational modernity.14 As a rural location, the Camino may seem anaberration in this discourse, but as a globally­recognised destination, thispredominately rural trail has become a cosmopolitan space. The Camino is a fascinating site for glimpsing some of the paradoxesof globalisation in the contemporary world. Marc Augé writes of theincreasing homogenisation of places in the global era. Non­places, as Augénames them, dominate the contemporary landscape. Non­places are placesof transit, they are measured in time but are without history, they are spacesthat are everywhere, and could be anywhere: airports, freeways, planes,hotels, are all typical non­places.15 One of the paradoxes of this is that asmultinational connections grow via the emphasis on movement through non­places, so there is simultaneously a clinging to the particulars of specificplaces.16 As David Harvey argues, the diminishment of barriers betweenspaces that is typical of globalisation, results in a parallel emphasis on theunique qualities of individual places. The particularities of the local becomeprized precisely because of their entanglement in global networks wherespeed has diminished distance, as such qualities are now accessible to aglobal market.17 The Camino is exemplary here, its global appeal parallelingthe assertion of the autonomy of the Galician region of Spain in whichSantiago is situated. This region, with its own language and culture, hasused the Camino to gain recognition of its specificity.18 This interplay,between the homogenous and the unique, between the global and the local,that we find in the Camino is a crucial element of Demuth’s Camino series.The source images for the works originate from a specific time and place,and this is almost mechanically designated in the title of each image. Yet,without distinguishing features each image could also be anywhereconjuring half­remembered places and films, and childhood paths andreveries. Similarly, Demuth’s transformation of the digital snapshot as recordof a journey (ubiquitous, disposable, and reproducible) into rare, carefully
constructed, and precious objects, extends this interplay of the homogenousand the unique into the material structure of the work. Tourism in general is defined by a constant oscillation betweengeneric spaces (the airport, the plane, the hotel, the Starbucks) and theunique sight/site of the destination, tied to a distinct physical location. Ourexperience of such sights is often already inflected by the cultural life ofthese places in the world of media: pictures, films, guidebooks and tales of
travels helping to form our expectations and colour our experience. Corinne Vionnet’s Photo Opportunities series of art works succinctly encapsulate this intermingling of our unique experience of spaces with our pre­defined media­inflected expectations. Vionnet scours photo­sharing websites to gather hundreds of images of monumental tourist destinations (the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, and so on) and then layers these images to form a ghostly, but immediately recognisable, singular archetypal image of the site. Only apparently slight variations separate these hundreds of images, indicating the shared language of the tourist photograph and the mediation of our experience of places.19
Memories and expectations are inseparable from the places that wevisit. Demuth’s Camino series embraces and explores this interplay, and is asmuch a product of post­production as of the places it represents. Constructedafter the journey, back home in the studio, the image­objects in this seriesare inspired by memory as much as by the moment yet as such, they alsopoint to the elusiveness of spontaneity in photography, and particularly travelphotography. The photos are taken in a particular time and place, but re­constructed and reflected upon, these moments intersperse with other placesand times. This is not to dismiss as inauthentic our experience mediatedthrough reproductions, but rather to recognise such images as a constitutivepart of the physical sites of our travels, each inseparable from the other.20Like the digitally­altered images of Michael Reisch,21 Demuth’s work is inmany ways an idealised or even fictionalised version of the landscape,hovering between simulation and reality, between memory and document.The ghostly three­dimensional optical effect created by the sculptural qualityof the work only enhances the work’s liminal character, between dream andreality, shifting in and out of focus. The work revels in the indistinguishabilityof the path from its imag(in)ing. The writer Will Self is a dedicated walker and has recently recounteda walk he made from London to Manhattan. This involved Self walking fromhis house to Heathrow Airport, catching an airplane to New York, and thenwalking from JFK Airport to downtown Manhattan: a juxtaposition of speedand slowness not unlike the international traveller’s journey to the Camino deSantiago.22 What is interesting about Self’s account of this walk, is that itturns out that this is less an exploration of the physical places along hisjourney, than of his memories and imaginative wanderings each place isoverlayed with significance through associations that are both real andfictional. Similarly in Demuth’s Camino series, these distinctions, betweentourist and traveller, speed and slowness, fiction and reality, the authenticand the inauthentic, evaporate. Embracing the paradox of the Camino, theworks create a world that is a part of this journey, but with a path of theirown.
Kyle Weise 2010 Kyle Weise is currently completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne andis the Co­director of Beam Contemporary and Screen Space art galleries.
1 Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins ofCultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. p.240. The relationshipbetween ‘time­space compression’ and capitalism is discussed throughoutHarvey’s book. Another key theorist on the centrality of speed in contemporarysociety is Paul Virilio. See, for example: Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer.Crepuscular Dawn. Trans. Mike Taormina. Foreign Agents Ser. New York:Semiotext(e), 2002. p.19­91.2 Rubén González and José Medina. “Cultural Tourism and Urban Managementin Northwestern Spain: The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela” TourismGeographies 5.4 (2003): 446­60.3 John Frow. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory andPostmodernity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. p.69.4 González and Medina, p.455. Michael Murray and Brian Graham. “Exploringthe Dialectics of Route Based Tourism: The Camino de Santiago.” TourismManagement 18. 8 (1997): 513­524. p.519.5 A Compostela is a papal document qualifying one as a pilgrim. Murray andGraham, “Exploring.” p.517­19, 522. Brian Graham and Michael Murray. “TheSpiritual and the Profane: the Pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela.” CulturalGeographies 4 (1997 ): 389­409. p.402­03.6 See, for example: Robert Adams. Perfect Times Perfect Places. New York:Aperture, 1988. Richard Misrach. Desert Cantos. Albuquerque, NM: U of NewMexico P, 1990. Stephen Shore. A Road Trip Journal. 1973. New York: Phaidon,2008 Stephen Shore. Uncommon Places. 1982. New York: DAP, 2004 JoelSternfeld. American Prospects. 1987. Third Edition. New York: DAP, 2006.7 Rosa Olivares. “Paradise Was Here Nearby.” Trans. Dena Ellen Cowan. Exit 38(2010): 12­13.8 Cathelijne de Busser. “From Exclusiveness to Inclusiveness: The ChangingPolitico­Territorial Situation of Spain and its Reflection on the National Offeringsto the Apostle Saint James from the Second Half of the Twentieth Century.”Geopolitics 11 (2006):300­316. p.304. Murray and Graham, “Spiritual” p.390.9 de Busser, p.304­09. Murray and Graham, “Spiritual.” p.390­91.10 Murray and Graham, “Spiritual” p.399.11 de Busser, p.312.12 Murray and Graham, “Exploring” p.520.13 de Busser, p.314.14 Marvin D’Lugo. “Landscape in Spanish Cinema.” Cinema and Landscape. Ed.Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner. Bristol: Intellect, 2010. 117­129. p.126­28.15 Marc Augé. Non­Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Demuth’s Time : Date : Space (2008)series conjures such non­places.16 Augé, p.34­35.17 Harvey, p.294­96.18 de Busser, p.311­12. González and Medina, p.448. Official Church offeringsto Saint James are now given partly in the Galician language: the Saint andjourney continue to be embroiled in all manner of discourses that turn this ruralpath into a symbolically loaded space.19 Corinne Vionnet and Welmer Keesmaat. “Photo Opportunities.” Yvi Magazine2 (2008): 75­81. See also http://www.corinnevionnet.com.20 On this relationship, see Frow p.66­74.21 Michael Reisch. Michael Reisch. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006.22 Will Self. Psychogeography: Distentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psycheand Place. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007.
Images from front to back: Camino Dia 29Campo 4.16pm 20.06.2008Camino Dia 27Chozas de Abajo 3.34pm 14.06.2008Ribadeo 8.45pm 19.07.2008 (Diptych)Torre de Hercules 10.22am 14.07.2008Camino Dia 31Burgos 6.36am 04.06.2008O'Cebreiro 11.13pm 24.06.2008
The artist would especially like to thank Simone Hine and Kyle Weise for the successful outcome of thisproject. Thank you also to Arts Queensland and Artspace Mackay for their support and contribution. ISBN 978­0­9870529­0­2
beam contemporary level 1/30 guildford lane melbourne australia 3000e: info@beamcontemporary.com.au w: www.beamcontemporary.comph: +61 3 9670 4443 post: p.o box 664 north melbourne victoria australia 3051